


Visitors in the Cosmere

by dragoninatrenchcoat



Series: Visitormere [1]
Category: Cosmere - Brandon Sanderson, Elantris - Brandon Sanderson, Mistborn - Brandon Sanderson, Stormlight Archive - Brandon Sanderson, The Alloy of Law - Brandon Sanderson
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-28
Updated: 2016-09-02
Packaged: 2018-08-11 13:00:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7893616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dragoninatrenchcoat/pseuds/dragoninatrenchcoat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A regretful war general, a master of disguise, a logician and artist, a determined high priest, a practical noblewoman, a courageous prince, a thoughtful bookworm, and a lush god.</p><p>For whatever reason, these are the eight people, separated by time and scattered throughout the cosmere, that are somehow inexorably linked by this thing called visiting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Visitors](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4515243) by [Riona](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Riona/pseuds/Riona). 



> Directly inspired by the mess that is the "Visitorverse" AC fic series, which was directly inspired by Sense8.

Getting onto the train was the easy part. The tricky part was avoiding the man who came by to collect tickets. Always struck Wayne as funny, tickets; wasting perfectly good strips of paper, giving them out only to collect them back again. It was a rather fun game of hat-swapping, dancing between different carriages and compartments, talking so sweetly about knowing the other passengers that even they thought they knew him for a moment, taking his leave before they remembered that they didn’t.

But then the ticketman passed the empty compartment Wayne had claimed for his own, the hard part was over, and he was free to lounge back and take a nice nap.

“Oh,” said a small voice to his left.

He paused and looked toward the compartment door, half-laying, with one foot up on the seat across the way. Standing just inside and staring at him was a little girl that he didn’t remember seeing in any of the other compartments. Was she dancing around the ticketman too?

“Hey,” he said, smiling to her. “What’s your name?”

The girl glanced around herself. She wasn’t that old, maybe five or six or ten—Wayne wasn’t very good at the differences between kid ages. She looked just too young to work in a sawmill but too old to go around being carried. She didn’t look to be caught dead anywhere near a sawmill, anyway, with bright red hair and easily the most expensive dress he’d ever seen on somebody that small.

“No dust,” he commented, nodding toward her skirt. “D’you fly into the train, then? Never seen a clean skirt in the roughs before.”

She stared at him. She didn’t answer him, or laugh, or say anything, really, but she didn’t leave or call the ticketman back either.

“What’s your name?” he asked again. “Mine’s Wayne.”

She held her little hands together in front of her, and very politely, she said, “Shallan Davar.”

He tipped his hat. “Pleased t’make your acquaintance, Lady Shallan.”

She curtseyed. It looked pretty practiced to him. She must have been richer than he assumed (not a very high bar, considering he’d assumed no one coming from this far in the roughs could be very rich at all). That made sense with the whole no-dust-on-the-skirt thing; rich folk tended to be able to not get dirty when they wanted to. Maybe she was wearing some kind of dust-free skirt fabric.

“What’re you heading to Elendel for?” he asked her.

Her eyes drifted to the window, where the sparse trees and grasslands of the roughs whizzed past. She blinked.

She didn’t say anything at all, and after a minute or so, Wayne realized that she wasn’t moving, either. Or blinking. He took his foot down from the other seat and leaned forward, frowning at her.

“You alright?” he asked.

She vanished into thin air.

Wayne yelped, jumping back so sharply that he knocked his head something good against the window. First Miles being in charge, then phantom rich girls disappearing into thin air—Wax deciding to leave has caused no end of problems for Wayne.

When he got to Elendel, he was going to talk some sense into that boring old man.


	2. Chapter 2

There weren’t any _ rules _ about drinking alone at home in the middle of the day. Not really. There weren’t really many _ rules _ about anything—and if you were the brother of the King, you didn’t even really need to listen to the rules that _ did _ exist. Basically, Dalinar reasoned, it came down to this: He wanted to drink, the boys were gone, and he had some heady, dark violet waiting in a cabinet.

He hadn’t even needed to bother the servants about it.

The first bottle was half gone before anyone showed up, and by then, Dalinar really didn’t care. If it was one of the boys, he could wave them off with a chore or something or other, and if it was a servant, well, his servants had seen him worse off than this before.

But it wasn’t Adolin or Renarin or one of the servants. It was… one of _ those _ people. The people he’d only really seen while he was drunk (though, granted, he was drunk a lot of the time). The possibility of seeing them again should probably have crossed his mind when he’d gone for the violet, but then, not much had really crossed his mind at all.

The one who had shown up this time was the young darkeyed man in the odd expensive-looking clothing, the one who carried a book around with him all the time and tended to call him Brightlord.

“Brightlord?” he said, making Dalinar almost chuckle. He grunted in reply and took another long draft, wishing he’d ordered food.

The young man—El.. Elden? That sounded about right—circled Dalinar’s seat. Whenever he visited one of them or they visited him, they always looked at his face carefully. He didn’t know what they always looked for, but they never seemed to find it.

“Want some?” Dalinar said after a moment, proferring his half-empty cup.

“No, thank you,” said Elden. “Er… where are…?”

“Adolin and Renarin?” Dalinar asked, very nearly mispronouncing both names. “At the palace.”

“I see. And…?”

Elden trailed off as Dalinar finished off the goblet, tipping the bottom up to pour the last of it into his mouth. “And what?” Dalinar asked, setting it down a little too hard on the table.

“Well, it… for you, it must be after…” The darkeyes frowned a little, but then elected to sit without invitation at the seat across the table. Dalinar would have had him thrown out for that, if the servants would have been able to see Elden, or if Dalinar had decided to care about propriety at the moment.

Dalinar poured himself another cup. He always preferred pouring his own wine, particularly when he was alone. The servants always either did it too slowly or frowned at him for doing it incorrectly. Who in damnation cared that much about how the storming wine got into the goblet, anyway?

Master-servants, he supposed.

“It’s… hard to see you like this,” Elden said after a moment. Dalinar frowned at him as he set the bottle down again.

“Like what?”

“Well… drinking.”

Dalinar did chuckle at that, a sort of dry laugh, the sound of it pulling painfully at the dark, jagged hole in his chest. As a reflex, he took a hefty gulp of wine in order to prevent himself from thinking about it. “I always drink, Elden.”

“Not like-” the young man stopped. “My name is Elend.”

Oh. He’d been close, anyway. Dalinar waved his hand to indicate that he really didn’t care one way or the other.

“You started drinking a lot more heavily after your wife-”

Dalinar’s goblet hit the table a _ lot _ harder than it should have this time, the jagged hole in his chest yawning with a sharp pain that he hadn’t had enough wine to suppress, and he glared at Elend. The darkeyes raised his hands defensively.

“I’m just saying,” Elend said. “It hurts. I wish you’d…” He sighed. “Well, I don’t know.”

“Why’re you here, anyway?” Dalinar asked, his voice growling with a flat anger. “You show up to talk about my dead wife and criticize the way I drink? That’s all I ever hear from you lot. Stop drinking. Start thinking properly. Thinking properly is my storming brother’s job, you know that.”

Elend’s mouth twisted into a grimace. Dalinar finished off his goblet. If he drank fast enough, the tears wouldn’t come. He was finished with crying; he’d much rather be drunk.

“I know,” Elend said finally. “I just… I wish I could be more helpful than I am, I suppose. I wish you would let us be helpful.”

“You all know the future,” Dalinar heard himself say. “I couldn’t prosecute you for it even if I wanted to, and you all told me enough that I know it’s true.”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“You knew she was going to die.”

Elend’s hand went over the spine of his book, his fingers tapping it at the corner. He didn’t say anything. A man who reads and knows the future; it was just as well that no one knew Dalinar could see him.

“If you’d wanted to help, you would have told me,” Dalinar said gruffly, pouring out the last of the bottle. “You didn’t.”

They sat in silence for a little while. Dalinar drank solidly. Talking about her always made it worse. He should have kicked Elend out the moment he’d gotten there; there was a chance that he wouldn’t have thought of her at all if Elend hadn’t brought her up.

“I didn’t,” the young man said, finally, so quietly that Dalinar almost missed it. “I’m sorry.”

Dalinar scoffed.

“I know it’s not enough, but… I am sorry.”

His goblet was almost gone already. Time to find a second bottle.

“Whatever, kid,” he said, then finished out the goblet and got up from his seat. By the time he’d fished out a second bottle and turned around, Elend was gone.


	3. Chapter 3

“Hey, lobster!” said a familiar grating voice. Hrathen sighed.

When he’d felt the visit beginning and his vision had begun to blur, just for that moment before the visit had the chance to start properly, Hrathen had prayed that he be sent, specifically, to someone who _ wasn’t _ Wayne. Unfortunately, Jaddeth hadn’t graced him with answer to that particular prayer.

He turned to see the young man sprawled across an armchair, with a nut of some sort in one hand. The armchair was part of a well-put-together ensemble, a part of a furniture set so perfectly placed that it didn’t seem to expect to be actually used.

“Here to go on a mission with me?” Wayne asked, then popped the nut into his mouth.

Hrathen sighed. “You know as well as I do that these things can’t be controlled. If they could, I certainly wouldn’t be here.”

“I’m choosin’ to ignore the rude part of that sentiment,” Wayne said. He got up from the chair so suddenly that he actually bounced on his heels a little, grinning, and Hrathen leaned back to avoid being too close to him. “You can’t not come along, can’t you? Well, then—come along!”

“What?” Hrathen asked, but Wayne leapt for the front door.

There was a boundary that none of them could cross, a good twenty or so feet from the person being visited, and when the edge of that boundary drew near it was either keep up or be dragged. Wayne’s haste to get through and out the front door brought that boundary close in record time. Hrathen grumbled, but followed Wayne outside.

“What are you doing?” he asked when Wayne finally stopped by a canal, the young man beaming a grin as he leaned back against a half-wall. Hrathen heard a rumor once—from Shallan, specifically—that Wayne could be serious when he wanted to. Hrathen wasn’t sure he believed that.

“I’ve got a very important mission to complete,” Wayne said. He seemed to be talking in some kind of a conspiratorial tone, but far too loudly for that to truly be the case. He’d seen Wayne in disguise; the man actually had a masterful command over his own voice and body. So Hrathen knew for a fact that Wayne was mocking him.

“Is that so?” Hrathen said flatly.

“Very important. You see that girl over there?”

Despite himself, Hrathen turned to look. There was no girl over there. He looked back at Wayne.

“You’re gonna kiss her.”

Hrathen paused.  _ “What?” _

Wayne’s grin widened, which Hrathen hadn’t known was possible. “You. That girl. Smooching.”

“Wayne, I’m not going to- that’s not how this- there is no girl over there! Have you gone _ more _ insane since I last saw you?”

“There she is,” Wayne said, nodding behind Hrathen again.

Hrathen turned to see that a girl had, indeed, turned the corner onto their street. She was taller than most, with long, blonde hair pinned back, and carrying a basket of bread. He stiffened.

“Sarene?” he said, shocked.

“Dead ringer, eh?” Wayne sounded proud of himself. “Saw her last week on Demoux. Turns out she crosses the canal every day for bread. Knew I would find her here, if you happened to show up at the right time of day.”

Hrathen ripped his gaze away from her to stare at Wayne. “You… what? You followed her?”

“Yup. Weren’t that hard, really. She doesn’t know the first thing about not bein’ followed.”

“Why?”

Wayne gestured toward her with an open arm, an expression on his face like it should be _ perfectly obvious _ why he’d decided to stalk an unknown woman.

When Hrathen didn’t appear to get the perfectly obvious reason, Wayne shook his head somberly. “I don’t know how a man as dense as you could get elected to head lobster.”

“Wayne-”

“I did it for _ you _ ,” he said, exasperated. “So you could kiss her. Which you should do soon, mate, she’s gettin’ away and I don’t know when you’ll visit around this time of day again.”

“I’m not kissing her.”

Wayne looked at him, then shrugged. “Your loss. I’d say you could try again next time it all lines up, but who knows? She could die out there. Or find another bakery.”

He began heading back toward Wax’s manor, but Hrathen watched where the Sarene-like girl stepped onto the canal bridge, making her way home. She really was a ‘dead ringer’. She looked... peaceful. He wondered if Sarene ever felt like that, or if she was too busy fighting.

Then the boundary pushed against him, and he shook the thoughts away.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> About Gods
> 
> yes, I know how vague this is, given that the god-to-mortal ratio in the cosmere is probably approaching 1:1

“...can’t _ believe _ I had a son like this,” said a striking voice, full-bodied and spitting with displeasure. “It’s bad enough you’re not an Allomancer-”

“You’ve told me more times than I can count how discomfited you are with me-”

“Then why haven’t you changed, young man!”

That exclamation had a heavy _ thump _ accompanying it, something like a heavy thing colliding with a wooden table. Lightsong’s best guess was that it was either a fist or a goblet of some kind.

“My goal in life isn’t to please you, father.”

“It should be.”

Lightsong winced at the growl in that phrase, part anger, part disappointment.

After a pause, the older voice said, “Don’t do it again.”

There was a shifting sound, like wood sliding across wood. A chair, probably, though Lightsong didn’t know if the man was getting up or sitting down. He frowned at the wooden floor across from him. There were footsteps, but they sounded too light to belong to the man with the older, larger voice.

Elend rounded the corner and glanced up at him, then kept walking.

“Hey- hey!” Lightsong said, then ran a little to catch up. He had to stand in a perpetual sort-of-crouch whenever he had these visions or he risked catching his head on the ceiling. He did it often anyway, usually by forgetting he had to crouch, but sometimes just because all these people were too colors-damned small.

“Looks like I got here at a bad time,” he said when he caught up to Elend, peering at him sideways at an awkward angle. “I didn’t want to interrupt.”

Elend glanced at him warily. “I’m sure you wanted to, Lightsong.”

It was hard to shrug in this position, but he gave it his best shot. “Yeah, I wanted to. And usually, wanting to do something _ is _ all the motivation I need to do it. But I try to be better than that for you guys, you know? Us vision-gods have to stick together.”

The young man sighed, leading Lightsong through a doorway, which Lightsong practically had to fold himself in quarters in order to get through. “I told you,” Elend said. “I keep telling you. The rest of us aren’t gods. At least I’m not.”

Lightsong laughed. “Yeah, I’m just having visions about normal, boring people. Sure.”

“They’re not visions, either, they’re visits.”

“I don’t see what the difference is.”

They reached Elend’s bedroom then. It was still too low for Lightsong, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as the hallways. Elend kept moving though, opening the door on the other side to let the sunlight in from the balcony. After ducking through it—only having to fold himself in half for this one—he could stand up and stretch.

He wound up doing a lot of talking on balconies during these visions.

“If I were a god, wouldn’t I be as tall as you?” Elend pointed out, leaning backwards on the railing.

“Well, sure, if you were on _ my _ world,” Lightsong said. It made perfect sense to him, and Llarimar agreed with him, so why did the others always argue? “But doubtless gods work differently on different worlds.”

“Yeah, well, if I were a god, I don’t think I’d have to deal with my father.” He turned around at that, looking out at the city.

It was a lot different than Hallandren. A  _ lot _ different. Little to no colors, for one, a big old city built of old grey stones and covered with black-grey ash. The only color came from the sun hanging in the sky, and the only colors _ that _ provided were gradients of blood-red. If it weren’t for all the crenellations and statues and wrought-iron filigreed fences, he’d have thought he’d accidentally stepped into Idris.

“Maybe you’re the god of Hell,” Lightsong guessed. Elend let out a surprised scoff, looking up at him. “What?” he continued, gesturing out to the city. “Looks like Hell to me.”

Elend laughed at that, a real laugh, looking out again. “Does your religion _ have _ a hell?”

“Why not? I’m a god. If I say there’s a hell, why can’t there be a hell?”

“Wouldn’t you be the god of Hell, then? Having created it and all.”

“You think I _ created _ boldness? It was already there when I started existing, I just took up its name. Well, other people told me to take it up as my name. Really, I didn’t get much of a say in it.”

Elend just shook his head. Lightsong sat on the floor against the wall, even though he didn’t have to; he usually only sat on the floor when there was no standing room and he was tired of slouching over.

“Speaking of boldness,” Lightsong said after a moment, “why _ do _ you put up with him?”

“Who, my father?”

“No, the _ other _ old man with a stick up his ass who hates you. What’s keeping you here?”

There was a pause, then he saw the hint of a smile cross Elend’s features, where he still looked out at the big city before them. What was it called? Lue… Lute... Lutalen… Llarimarton. Lightsong was terrible with names, it was just luck that he could remember the other vision-gods’ names when he had to. (Or maybe it wasn’t luck, but a god thing.) Throwing in all their weird city and kingdom and whatever names was just asking far too much of him.

“I’m reading books about government,” Elend said, finally. “Illegal books, about theoretical forms of government that  _ don’t _ involve the Lord Ruler.”

“He’s your God-King, right?”

“Yeah, close enough. I just… I know it’s not possible to _ actually _ dethrone him or kill him or anything, and I know terrible things would happen if someone did manage to do it. Economic collapse. Mass panic, you know, that kind of thing. But I just… I feel like I’m doing the right thing by researching this. Like _ someone _ needs to, like we can’t just let this knowledge die or get killed by the obligators.”

Lightsong frowned. “That sounds like a lot of work.”

The hinted smile presented itself full-force then as Elend glanced at him. “It is a lot of work.”

It was easy to forget sometimes that Elend was one of _those_ people. The ones that actually _liked_ to work. Lightsong didn’t really understand those people, but he recognized that they were important. Actually, most of the other vision-gods were those people. The only person he could think of that might not was Wayne, but even he delighted in elbow grease sometimes. He just delighted in _not_ working just as much as he did in working, and that threw Lightsong off.

“I don’t see how that’s worth dealing with him, anyway.”

“Nothing is, really, but I don’t have a choice. I am a Venture. I live here. All I have to do is wait until he dies, and I’ll have control of our house’s assets. I’ll marry, probably, and have kids, and when I die, one of them will take our responsibilities. There’s no way out of all that.”

Lightsong let out a breath. “Yeah, I guess I know what that’s like.”

Elend shot him a curious look, but Lightsong could feel the vision ending, so rather than provide any useful information, he went instead for an enigmatic grin.

Then the balcony faded, and with it went the thick smell of ash that he hadn’t even noticed until it was gone. He blinked to find himself standing once more in his hall of paintings.

“Another vision?” asked Lightsong’s high priest, a guy with a hat that seemed to Lightsong to _ almost _ be too big for him, but not quite. He had an urgent look in his eyes, waving over one of the scribes.

“Yeah,” Lightsong said, shrugging. “It was Elend again. We talked about why he didn’t want to leave his dad.”

Lightsong could tell Llarimar was frustrated, but only through very subtle facial expression. The high priest was annoyingly good at being patient. “Could you provide any details?”

“We were on a balcony.”

Lightsong hadn’t minded recounting his visions the first few times they’d happened, but it had gotten tedious, fast. If he entertained Llarimar and started providing details, the man would keep asking questions and they’d be standing there talking about it until he just got another one. He didn’t have any time for that; he was already late for the lounging around he’d meant to be doing today.

So he turned back to his paintings, and left Llarimar to worry about what being on a balcony meant.


End file.
